Marave – Distraction free writing in Linux

The never-ceasing distractions of tweets, pokes on Facebook, Gmail spam  & match.com matches to review are all enemies of writing. Was there ever an activity assailed by the vampires of impetuosity as much as writing?

Marave aims to combat this by shoving everything but the task in hand out of the way. No toolbars, menus or web-browser peeking from underneath the window; As my mother likes to say, ‘out of sight, out of mind’.

Features

Marave is, at its heart, nothing more than a full screen text editor. Whilst this may sound like a trade-off it’s an approach that works. With nothing else on the screen vying for you attention, other than your words, a clarity of mind is invoked.

The default look of Marave is text overlayed on a background image. If this look doesn’t riles you up in the right places the settings dialogue contains other themes (yes, including the obligatory terminal-esque theme).

Changing the background only is easy enough. Once needs only to hover over the hidden toolbar, click on the  ‘camera’ icon and use the left/right buttons to scroll through supplied images. Pressing the colour wheel allows you to set a solid colour as background.

Marave is incredibly configurable – but has the odd flinky feature

Other features include the ability to make text larger or smaller at the click of a button, change text font (though if you have too many fonts you’ll find many lay out of reach as you can’t scroll) and colour.

Spellcheck, plug-in support and one of those features you have no idea what it does are also present.